Prologue

A HOT DAY TO BURY SOMEONE

It was a bright, hot morning at the end of June, one of those Louisiana days when the heat and the humidity make a shawl of the air long before noon. Traffic was piling up along Crowder Boulevard near where the land ends and the lake begins. Automobiles and motorcycles were parked willy-nilly all around the intersection of Crowder and Morrison, stashed side by each on the grass of the island dividing the boulevard, overwhelming the parking lot of the barbecue-meat place and the check-cashing joint a little ways down from the intersection. For the most part, these were not civilian vehicles. Most of the cars had red lights on their roofs. Most of them had emblems on their doors. Kenner. Slidell. Gretna. The Louisiana State Police motorcycle honor guard. Occasionally, there was the brief blast of a siren, just to clear the road. There was going to be a funeral at St. Maria Goretti, and nobody wanted to be late.

They were burying Daryle Holloway that morning, a member of the New Orleans Police Department shot and killed in the line of duty a week earlier. All over the spreading lawn in front of the church, cops in formal uniform stood in small groups, tugging their tight collars, angling for what little breeze there was. A great spreading oak tree provided blessed shade. Gradually, in twos and threes, the assembled police from all over the state gravitated to the cool darkness beneath it. Two aging police horses stood alone in the sun, drooping as though they would melt right into the earth. It was the last week in June, and they were burying Daryle Holloway.

A week earlier, down on North Claiborne Avenue, Daryle Holloway had rolled up to transport a guy named Travis Boys to the Orleans Parish Prison. Somehow, according to police, Boys got free of his handcuffs. Somehow, Boys got hold of a gun. He shot Holloway through the partition that separated them in Holloway's patrol car. They struggled in the car until Boys got out and ran. Holloway, dying at this point, rammed his patrol car into a utility pole. He died in a hospital an hour later.

Freddie DeJean wandered amid the police cruisers and the satellite trucks that were scattered like jackstraws on the island in the middle of Crowder Boulevard. He was there because Daryle Holloway had gone to St. Augustine High School with his stepson, Malord Gales. "He got along with everybody, man," Freddie said. "Daryle was the type of police officer, man, that you would wish he would stop you. Because he gon' talk to you. You know? He's not like some of the police officers, you know, they talk to you bad. You know? He wasn't that way, man. I'm hoping that maybe some of the NOPD would take a page out of Daryle's book and do like he did toward the people of the community." In 2001, Malord Gales was shot during a robbery at a grocery store, and he has been in a persistent vegetative state ever since. Freddie rented a van so that Malord could come out this morning and say goodbye.

That was the way it was on that bright, hot morning. Everyone, it seemed, had a story to tell about Daryle Holloway. A lot of those stories had to do with what is now known in New Orleans, a decade later, simply as the storm.

On August 30, 2005, a day after Hurricane Katrina came raging out of the Gulf of Mexico and right about the time when a lot of Holloway's fellow officers were abandoning the city to whatever came next, Holloway made his way to Charity Hospital, the great art deco monument to a different time and a different kind of medical care that loomed above Tulane Avenue like ancient Troy above the plains of Turkey. At that point, Charity was a virtual island, cut off from the rest of the city and, indeed, from the rest of the world. Its basement had flooded, taking out the massive building's electrical systems. Olander Holloway, Daryle's mother, was the head nurse in Charity's emergency department. Her son went to the hospital to make sure she was all right and to see what he could do to help. By then, all of Charity Hospital was an emergency department. Hell, all of New Orleans was an emergency department.

For the next several days, Daryle Holloway went out on boats all over the city to rescue people who were trapped in their homes or stuck on their rooftops. He was not a small man. His friends jived at him that the little boats they were using might not be able to handle him, that they'd all capsize somewhere in the Lower Ninth. This would have been a problem. Daryle Holloway couldn't swim. One of Holloway's friends showed a picture to New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry in which Holloway is leading a family out of the attic of their flooded house, where they had been trapped for several days. But there is a more famous picture of Daryle Holloway.

Some places here were preserved. Some were not. Some people here were treasured and some were discarded, and that's what you find when you dig and you come to the layer in all of them where you find the great cataclysm that was the storm. It ravaged them all and connected them in ways that are still somewhat mysterious.

It was taken by a doctor named Bennett deBoisblanc, who had been running the critical-care department throughout the storm and the long, painful week that followed. Holloway is shown sitting on the low concrete wall of an emergency ramp at Charity Hospital. His shirt is unbuttoned and he wears on his face what combat veterans undoubtedly would call a Thousand-Yard Stare. The background in the photo looks as though someone were playing a trick with the camera. Everything in it—a car, a fallen street sign, what appears to be a streetlamp—stands atop its own inverted reflection. It takes a moment before you realize what you're seeing there behind the picture of the exhausted Daryle Holloway. Everything in the background is floating.

It is the story of that picture that was the story so many people now told about Daryle Holloway. A story that connected to so many other stories through the prism of what happened to New Orleans ten years ago. It is the connective tissue that binds Daryle Holloway's story, and his life, and even his death, to so many other stories, so many other lives, so many other deaths. That was the story that they told on the bright, hot morning on which they buried him. It was a beautiful day. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

***

All archaeology is about layers, one city laid atop the others, as though civilization were coming from deep in the earth and piling itself up toward the sky. In the late nineteenth century, when the German adventurer and archaeologist—and part-time fantast—Heinrich Schliemann went looking for the city of Troy, he found eleven of them, one atop another. At one level, Schliemann found a cache of gold and jewelry that he pronounced to be the treasure of Priam, the king of Troy at the time of the events of the Iliad. He was wrong. The gold had been found at what later was determined to be only Troy II. It is popularly believed now that Troy VII was the site of the war about which Homer wrote. There are bronze arrowheads there, and skeletons bearing the marks of hor-rendous injuries, and there is evidence of a great fire. What Schliemann wrote when he first made his discoveries there has held remarkably true for all the layers of Troy that have been unearthed since then:

"I have proved that in a remote antiquity there was in the Plain of Troy a large city, destroyed of old by a fearful catastrophe, which had on the hill of Hissarlik only its Acropolis, with its temples and a few other large edifices, whilst its lower city extended in an easterly, southerly, and westerly direction, on the site of the later Ilium; and that, consequently, this city answers perfectly to the Homeric description of the sacred site of Ilios."

New Orleans police officer Daryle Holloway, September 1, 2005, exhausted from a day rescuing the trapped and desperate from the attics and rooftops of New Orleans. Holloway would not live to see the tenth anniversary of the storm.

Courtesy Dr. Bennett deBoisblanc

There is an archaeology to human lives, too, and it is very much the same. Human lives have layers, one atop the other, as though the individual were rising from the dust of creation toward the stars. Some of the layers show nothing much at all. Some of them, like the dark layers at Troy that indicate a vast fire, show that something very important happened to the lives in question. Hurricane Katrina, and all of the myriad events surrounding it, both good and bad, is that vast, sweeping layer within the lives of the people of New Orleans. Almost fifteen hundred people died. There was $100 billion in damage. The levees failed. The city flooded. The city, state, and federal governments failed even worse than the levees did. It was estimated in 2006 that four hundred thousand people were displaced from the city; an estimated one hundred thousand of them never returned. Parts of the city recovered. Parts of the city were rebuilt. Parts of the city gleam now brighter than they ever did. There will be parades on the anniversary of the storm because there are things in the city to celebrate, but it is the tradition in this city that the music doesn't lively up and the parade really doesn't start until the departed has been laid to rest, until what is lost is counted, and until the memories are stored away. Only then does the music swing the way the music is supposed to sound. Only then do they begin to parade.

There will be some joy in the tenth-anniversary celebration because of this, but the storm is there in everyone, a dark layer in the archaeology of their lives. For some people, it is buried deeply enough to be forgotten. For others, the people who live in the places that do not gleam and that are not new, it is closer to the surface. A lot of the recovery is due to what author Naomi Klein refers to as "disaster capitalism." The city has been reconfigured according to radically different political imperatives—in its schools and its housing and the general relationship of the people to their city and state governments. Many of them felt their lives taken over by anonymous forces as implacable as the storm was. There will be some sadness in the tenth anniversary because of this, fresh memories of old wounds, a sense of looming and ongoing loss. The storm is the dark layer in all the lives. And because it is, the storm is what unites them still, like that burned layer of Troy.

It is what connects the memory of Daryle Holloway to that of Bennett deBoisblanc, both of whom worked to save lives at Charity Hospital, which is now closed, never to reopen. It connects them all, this dark layer in the deep strata of their lives. It connects Charity Hospital to the Lower Ninth Ward in the life of Irma Mosley, who was born at Charity fifty-four years ago and who now works at a community center in the Lower Ninth. It is on St. Claude Avenue, not far from where Daryle Holloway, whose mother worked at Charity, was shot and killed.

***

Part One

CRASH ON THE LEVEE

There are signs of life along St. Claude in the Lower Ninth. But move a little bit off the main drag and you see the empty staircases, line after line of them, usually three brick steps leading into nothing but the air. Once, those steps led into the houses that made up neighborhoods. Now they sit like disembodied limbs of a great vanished beast. The Lower Nine always was an island of sorts; as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the city fathers of New Orleans decided to build what is now called the Industrial Canal to connect Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River. The new canal bisected the Ninth Ward and created what became known as the Lower Ninth Ward.

On August 29, 2005, the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina roared up the Industrial Canal and also up another nearby waterway with sufficient power that the levee on the Industrial Canal collapsed with a huge roar. The floodwaters ripped houses from their foundations, leaving behind only the mute staircases when the waters finally receded. They carried a gigantic barge through the breach in the levee and dropped it on a bus. People were rescued from rooftops. People drowned in the streets and suffocated in their attics. This was where Daryle Holloway drifted in his tiny boat, listening for muted cries from the houses. And for the next several days, as the country watched in amazement and horror, it was the Lower Ninth, and the people who lived there, that became the face of the storm. They were poor. They were sick. They were a part of the country that the rest of the country ignored until there were bodies in the street and cries from the rooftops. There was sympathy, for sure. But there also was a thinly veiled contempt for the neighborhood and for the people who lived there. Only the Lower Ninth was ringed by troops. (Even later, when the residents were allowed back in by then-mayor, now convict, Ray Nagin, they had to convince national guardsmen to let them back to what was left of their property.) Businessmen and politicians elsewhere in New Orleans and Louisiana openly expressed relief that the neighborhood had been scoured of its residents. There was a strong political movement, led by one Dennis Hastert, simply to abandon the place for good.

Left on its own for days after the storm, Charity Hospital on Tulane Avenue now stands permanently abandoned, a ghostly monument to a different Louisiana, a different society.

Courtesy Louisiana Division of Historic Preservation

Today, along St. Claude, there are small shops and chain drugstores, but the Lower Nine is still poor and crime is still rampant. The All Souls Episcopal Church & Community Center is a sort of oasis amid the troubles of the present and the troubled memories of the past. Young children skitter through the halls until they see Happy Johnson, the director of the center, who makes them all go back the way they came and walk like ladies and gentlemen should. Everybody's going on a field trip this afternoon. There is a charge running through the place that is at odds with the stolid, unchanging poverty along the street outside.

Johnson is a son of the Chicago projects. His father was long gone and his mother was on drugs, and Happy bounced between foster homes and the Ida B. Wells Homes. He made it out, got accepted to Georgetown, and in November of 2005, he came to New Orleans and to the Lower Nine to help with the relief effort. He never has left.

"You know, people kind of at the brink of despair, hopelessness, kind of trying to figure out how to actually go about rebuilding their lives," Johnson recalls. "I joined a Red Cross disaster-relief unit that took these mobile feeding units to different places throughout the city to feed folks. So, you know, I saw the same people pretty much every day for about six or seven weeks coming to our van to get food. So even though it was a lot of despair and hopelessness, I still felt like I saw the true spirit of the people in New Orleans, because in the line, people would sing and they would find people that they knew. You know, basically made this my home. I felt a sense of connection to the place, which was very easy to do. It was easy to do that because of my own childhood."

Johnson has lived through all the broken promises and false starts that have marked the life of the Lower Nine since the storm. He has heard all the conspiracy theories, and he has seen the very real government neglect and government policies that so easily give rise to them—that the city wants to be cleansed still of its African-American residents, that it wants to transform itself into a jazz-and-food theme park for the rest of the country. It is still poor. The violent crime rate is double the national average. "In a lot of ways, government continues to fail people, the indigenous culture in particular," he says. "You think about—I mean, dramatic economic disparity, extreme denial of access to capital in terms of creating small business and new wealth, in terms of just employing people from poor neighborhoods, where construction is booming. How do you have an influx of billions of dollars in high-poverty areas and not employ the people in those communities?" And he still sees a neighborhood, or at least the living ghost of one, in the eyes of the people who came back.

Irma Mosley came here to the All Souls Episcopal Church to volunteer. She was born in Charity Hospital, a native of the Lower Nine like her mother and grandmother before her, got out a day before the storm hit. Her niece had a nice four-bedroom house in Baton Rouge. By the time the storm was blowing its worst, there were thirteen adults and twenty children staying in those four bedrooms. Her brother stayed where he was. Later, she learned he had floated away from his house on a mattress and spent the night in a tree. One of her cousins also spent a night in a tree, with a cat. In Baton Rouge, they all watched on TV as their neighborhood flooded and the bodies started floating in the street. One night, Irma was watching the news and she saw her mother's house and another one belonging to her aunt. There was a barge floating toward them. "I said, 'That's—it's on top of our auntie's house!' " Irma says. "They found thirteen bodies underneath there."

Some of Irma's family gave up. Her mother went to visit Irma's sister in Seattle that Thanksgiving and never returned. After a while, Irma came back and tried to find her house, but her house wasn't where she had left it. "Well, my house had floated," she explains. "If I'm on Tennessee Street, and you go up the bridge or you come down or come to where we at now—Caffin and St. Claude—my house was across the street, but you couldn't go straight across. When you get off the bridge, you couldn't turn. It was my house in the middle, and one neighbor on the right, and one neighbor on the left… . You couldn't even get in. You got in, the smell was so bad, you know, you had to wear the masks and all."

She settled into an apartment in Baton Rouge for several years, but she always wanted to come back to her neighborhood. While she was away, Make It Right, a foundation started by actor Brad Pitt, committed itself to building 150 new homes in the Lower Nine. One of them was on Tennessee Street, where Irma Mosley had grown up. "I got me one of them Brad Pitt houses," she says now with a chuckle. "I'm back over there on Tennessee." She got the furniture for her new house by volunteering at a Salvation Army center where they paid her through a kind of impromptu barter system. Irma got paid in furniture.

It's nearly time for the field trip, and the kids are bouncing off the walls. The morning has begun to glower a little over this small, bright place in the battered Lower Nine, where some of the stairs lead nowhere much at all, but where people still try to climb them.

***

Part Two

THE STIGMA OF CHARITY

The mosquitoes killed people, over and over again. They killed people in 1853, and in 1867, and in 1878, and finally in 1905. Aedes aegypti, the scientists called it. The Yellow Fever Mosquito. It bred all over town, anywhere there was standing water, which usually was pretty much anywhere, especially in the summer, when apocalyptic thunderstorms roll into New Orleans almost daily. Half the city still got its drinking water from cisterns in which they collected the rain. In 1905, the archbishop died of yellow fever that he probably caught from mosquitoes that had bred in the cathedral's holy-water font. The afflicted would flood Charity Hospital; in 1905, one hundred patients were treated there and nobody on the staff contracted the disease. There were no mosquitoes in Charity Hospital. It was a safe place to be poor. It was a safe place to be sick. It was a place you could go if you had nowhere else.

It is empty now. Huge and empty and signifying, right there on Tulane Avenue where they dropped the new building with its art deco facade in 1939, yet another of the monuments to the greatness that was Huey Long. It was the sixth hospital in New Orleans to bear the name Charity since the first one was opened in 1736 to care for the city's indigent population. It also was the last. It is too derelict to use and too signifying to tear down. Charity's looming hulk is a place big enough in which to see what came before the storm and what came after it, the good and the bad of history all at the same time. Actually, Charity Hospital is the whole damn story.

"Was it an outdated hospital? Sure. But it had its benefits," says James Moises, an emergency-room doctor who fought to reopen Charity after the storm. "So they had wards full of ten people instead of private rooms. It worked, it wasn't ideal, it was horrible, but if you had no health-care insurance and no place to go, these patients were like, 'I'm just grateful that you did this $50,000 operation and I got my leg back. I don't care if I'm in a ward. It's either that or lose my leg.' So it wasn't the most modern of hospitals, but it worked and it did what it was supposed to do, which is offer health care to people who needed it without the stigma of 'Okay, you're one of those poor Charity patients, I guess we'll take care of you.' That's what you get in the private sector. Nobody will admit that on record, but …"

Lower Ninth Ward, May 2015. While many areas of the city have recovered, much of the Lower Ninth Ward remains uninhabited.

Getty ImagesMario Tama

Up the street, not far from Charity, is the brand-new University Medical Center. It does not loom. It spreads greenly over several blocks of what used to be a Lower Mid-City neighborhood, before the storm came and Charity closed and before the people returned to their homes in Lower Mid-City at the invitation of the mayor and the city council and the business community, only to then take eminent domain right in the teeth. Two hundred and fifty homes and businesses were razed to clear the footprint for the sprawling and shiny new hospital. Charity remains, unrazed and empty, a ghostly museum to a time when Louisiana had different ideas about the poor, with generations of proof that if we cared for one another we wouldn't always be poor.

Its bricks and mortar had actually come through remarkably well, considering that Charity had been abandoned by every level of government for most of the storm. Only the basement of the great building had flooded, but that was where all the electrical facilities were, and the power winked out. In the madness that followed, Charity became a mad whirl of improvisation. People siphoned diesel fuel to run generators. They found ways to keep res-pirators operating. A Marine showed up who knew how to hot-wire a pickup truck, so they had a way to get people to the roof of a parking garage that they used as a triage facility.

"There were a lot of MacGyvers in here during that time," deBoisblanc says. "People in the city, when their houses flooded and their power failed, where did they turn for refuge? They turned to their hospitals. So they became sanctuaries. People came to the hospital for refuge."

The doctor became a bit famous, doing interviews from the garage on CNN and a number of other national newscasts. "The obvious first casualty was communication," deBoisblanc recalls. "And it only got worse from there. I think it was probably Wednesday morning when morale hit its lowest. We'd been in there without power for well over forty-eight hours and had been managing to take care of these sick people in this oppressive heat. After the storm went through and the sun came out, it was 100 degrees and there was all this water and the humidity.

"We were getting news feeds coming in on transistor radios that just weren't true. About people going around shooting. That there were snipers. That made us fearful to go outside. The outside world was hearing all of these horrible stories, so they were afraid to come in. The second part was being told that our salvation depended on somebody else, that we were not able to take care of ourselves. People, when they get idle, they get restless. Just sitting around was awful. And then there wasn't this esprit de corps that you really need. So it was Wednesday morning when people began to get this idea that if we're going to get off this rock, we're going to have to do it ourselves. We were kind of invisible for four or five days. I heard a news report that people were breaking into the pharmacy at Charity Hospital to steal drugs, and I was standing in the pharmacy at the time."

As the events of the storm passed, and with the help of the military, the staff at Charity worked endlessly to get the hospital back up and functioning. Within weeks, the building was declared "medical ready" by General Russel Honoré, the Army general who had bulldogged the relief effort from the moment he'd hit town. A subsequent study by RMJM Hillier, one of the world's most prestigious architecture firms, testified to the building's soundness and estimated that it would cost $550 million to convert it to a state-of-the-art hospital and research facility, and without taking out an entire neighborhood in the process. Charity stayed closed.

Second-line parade in honor of Officer Holloway, June 27, 2015.

Scott Threlkeld + The New Orleans Advocate

Curiously, once the troops pulled out, the volunteers who had labored to put it back together were locked out. Even more curiously, vandalism began to break out throughout the building, as will happen to places left to sink where they stood. The state, and LSU, which is often referred to as the fourth branch of the Louisiana state government, wanted their new medical center up the street, and now they had an opportunity, and a lot of public money, to get it for themselves. A civic brawl broke out between the people who wanted to save Charity and the people who needed it to stay closed. It was a microcosm of everything that was going on all over the city. It was a mirror in which you could see recovery and rebirth, or disaster capitalism at its most ruthless, depending on which end of the power continuum you found yourself on. Charity Hospital had become iconic one last time.

"When I started, I was really naive," says Sandra Stokes, a preservationist who led the fight to reopen Charity. "I believed that when we released this study and we showed them that if it saved $300 million and we didn't have to destroy a neighborhood, that we could get health care and the teaching hospital back in three years, that they would be excited. I didn't know I'd become the target after that… . Once we released the study, they attacked us immediately. They said that we didn't know what we were talking about. They said it had to be studied. It's, like, Whoa, wait. We just released really good information. Why are they attacking?"

The fight was over more than simply a sturdy old building versus what Stokes calls "a new shiny thing." The political powers of the state were moving to eliminate the very idea of Charity Hospital, the idea that had animated the six hospitals that had borne that name for more than 250 years. (One LSU administrator referred regularly to "the stigma" of Charity, which astounded patients and doctors alike.) After the storm had passed through, privatization was in the following wind. New governor Bobby Jindal had been elected on a platform that promised he would close all the charity hospitals around the state, which he did almost immediately. Bennett deBoisblanc works at the new medical center and sees the demise of Charity as part of something that was inevitable. "Ten years later, there's been a lot of healing," he says. "All New Orleanians talk about events pre-K and post-K, before the storm and after the storm. I think those who experienced loss carry that with them in a very bitter way, even to this day. But I think that many, many people feel that through this loss, there is an opportunity to rebuild in a new and better way. Out of any loss, there's an opportunity for rebirth.

"There's so much history at the hospital. There's only a handful of hospitals in the country that were these grande dames, these magnificent teaching hospitals. I do think, though, that a lot of what we are nostalgic about in the loss of those hospitals has to do with the fact that we had places where we could pack in poor people, where white doctors could learn how to practice medicine. I think it's time that we give up the past."

James Moises worked with deBoisblanc, and he laughs when he mentions how it was that they ended up on opposite sides of the fight to reopen Charity Hospital. "His state of mind would be totally different than mine because he's in the posse," Moises says. "So I mean, of course, and the new hospital's here to stay, it's just what the process was. I think the former governor of Louisiana said it nicely. Trying to remember how he quoted it. Edwin Edwards. For as bad as he was, he really was the governor for the poor people. And yet he may have stolen. But at least he did something good for the state, versus these other politicians, especially the ones that are there now, they steal and do nothing for the state. So he said something which was really kind of right on. He said just 'cause you're poor doesn't mean you're irresponsible. I think that was the term he used, which is true. They just can't get out. They can't get ahead." But they once had a place to get well. They once had a place where the mosquitoes did not go. But it did not gleam. It was not new. And that turned out to be the death of it.

***

This has been New Orleans ever since the waters rolled back—an endless struggle between what was and what can be, between endless loss and boundless opportunity. And parts of the city truly have enjoyed an astonishing renaissance. The Warehouse District is now a busy warren of art galleries, small restaurants, and craft shops, all locally owned. There are hometown breweries and a thriving educational technology community. Up around Lakeview, where the Seventeenth Street levee collapsed as thoroughly as did the walls of the Industrial Canal, there are brand-new houses, all of them spread out in parfait colors. All of this will be celebrated during the anniversary of the storm, which is how it should be. But there is always in this city the mourning before the celebration, the long dirge measuring a life lost that comes before the trumpet calls everyone to joyful celebration of a life well lived. There is no parade here that is not preceded by a cortege.

Archaeologists will tell you that they'd rather find a civilization's dumps than its palaces. A people is better defined by the everyday things it uses and discards than by what it treasures and preserves. There can be more knowledge to be gained from a shard of broken pottery than from an oaken chest full of gold. Human archaeology is a dodgier proposition. Memory can be an unreliable pick, and emotion the riskiest and clumsiest of all the shovels. But there is in New Orleans a common human archaeology that persists under everything that is new and everything that is old, that persists under everything that has changed and everything that has remained the same, under everything that was lost forever and under all that has been reborn. Some places here were preserved. Some were not. Some people here were treasured and some were discarded, and that's what you find when you dig and you come to the layer in all of them where you find the great cataclysm that was the storm. It ravaged them all and connected them in ways that are still somewhat mysterious. The day they buried Daryle Holloway, they threw a second line for him that evening in the Upper Ninth Ward. Thunderstorms rolled in. The rain didn't stop the parade.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.